


Sweethearts

by SpellCleaver



Series: Love Is Not Enough [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Character Study, Family, Friendship, Gen, Introspection, Leia deserves better than this, Memories, Skywalker Family Drama, Tragedy, mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-26 19:19:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12564388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpellCleaver/pseuds/SpellCleaver
Summary: Leia Skywalker, turned Organa, lost her family twice. This is what she remembers.





	Sweethearts

Leia Skywalker, turned Organa, lost her family twice. This is what she remembers.

The soft scent of the dried flowers hanging over her cradle as a child, the snow-capped peaks of Alderaan's mountains visible through the slats, a soft voice singing a lullaby and the gentle slide of wakefulness into sleep.

(Warmth and blood and newly forming bones and the thrum of her own life beating through her mind, her soul, her very being, and the thrum of someone's life beside her and the vibrations of outside voices running through them both.)

Sunlight glancing through billowing curtains and the affectionate chatter of her aunts as the six-year old twirls in her flowing white dress, watching with young fascination at the way the cloth ripples and drifts. She sits on her mother's knee and tries to listen to the conversation even when the clouds drift through an azure sky just beyond the window.

(Thumping and squeezing and a sudden cold against her face. A baby's cries - two babies' cries - some of them hers, some of them his. Screams and screams and screams, all of them _hers_ , panted words she can never quite make out, murmured words she knows doom him and her to be torn apart from each other, then silence, nothing but overwhelming _silence_.)

The weight of a white blaster in her hand and her staring at it, like if she only looks hard enough it will become something less repulsive. Her father's apologetic face: _I know you don't like it, but you have to stay safe, sweetheart. An Alderaanian doesn't fight when there is another solution, but I don't want to take the risk that there will always be one_. Years later, and the blaster is a natural part of her life, her aim immaculate.

(The sight through someone else's eyes of a planet coated in crawling city life emerging beyond a viewport, and knowing that this is Coruscant - _Imperial Centre_ \- as it once was. As it should be.)

A conversation with her mother over comlink, Breha Organa's still-beautiful face breaking up with interference from the poor signal found in the newest Rebel Base, although the concern and pride over what her husband and daughter are doing to help the galaxy are still evident even for a few moments after Leia switches off the device.

(Blazingly bright sand burning into eyes that aren't hers, the craggy rocks rising out of a Dune Sea, the pieces of a moisture vaporator lying in someone else's lap, their hands busy at work with fixing it. A woman's smiling face, worn rugged by the heat and sun; the stern lines around a brown-haired man's eyes and mouth even as he gives what her witness identifies as a look of pride; a young boy racing a speeder next to hers and laughing with abandon, without fear.)

Fear and pain and pounding hearts and crimson plasma shooting past her ear as she ducks to the side, hearing a scream of a stranger - no, not a stranger, her friend, her comrade, her _fellow Rebel_ \- killed in combat. She reaches out in her mind for her family, and she doesn't understand the soothing presence she feels in response, but she latches onto it anyway, and escapes the situation relatively unharmed.

(The face of a beautiful woman with Leia's hair and Leia's eyes and Leia's nose and Leia's chin frowning, her eyebrows creasing to form a little furrow, and then she lifts her head and begins to speak. She is in the Senate building, and Leia is watching from across the hall through the eyes of another person. Later, she learns that that woman was none other than Padmé Amidala, the Queen and Senator of Naboo.)

Hands knotting together on her first day in Rebel High Command, standing in for her father, scowling at General Madine when he tries to skirt around the more delicate topics because she senses he doesn't think a seventeen year old girl should hear them. A flush of laughter and fury mingling in her chest as she meets the eyes of Mon Mothma and General Rieekan from across the table, and they roll them simultaneously.

(The young boy again - older now, older than her - with Imperial-regulation dark hair and a flight suit on standing in the shadows of sun-bleached buildings and his lips shaping the words _The Rebellion is a long way from here_.)

Her father smiling at her with a sort of weary warmth, and squeezing her shoulder with more than a little concern. _Leia, I need you to do something for me. . ._ Watching him walk away again, and knowing she should get on the _Tantive IV_ and head for Tatooine as he'd asked, but unable to stop herself from staring, perhaps knowing in her heart that she'll never see him again.

(Hearing shots blast her ship and squeezing her eyes shut, remembering a different time, and different event - one that occurred less than a parsec away from where she is now, thirty two years earlier. Blasts rocking the ship, a queen and her handmaidens sitting tense, a captain's terse words _If we don't get those shields fixed we'll be sitting ducks out here!_ It does nothing to help her, but she opens her eyes and moves to record the message anyway.)

Walking up to the imposing figure of the Emperor's right hand man, and coolly stating that _only you could be so bold_. A stray thought slips through her mind: This man is the furthest from her father one could ever hope to meet.

**.**

There is pain and there is torture and _tell me where the Rebel Base is you know you want to tell me_ and no no _no_ _-_

_(There are two droids she knows and loves but they are on a desert planet and she doesn't know the young, tanned face she sees reflected in Artoo's optical scanner even if it's so achingly familiar her heart changes beats with it.)_

_(There is a pain in her head and an old man's face swimming out of the darkness with a smile, and a prayer of_ Ben? Ben Kenobi? _falling from lips that aren't hers.)_

_(There is a large, upturned vehicle in front of her and the corpses of dozens of small beings swathed in robes scattered at her feet, and the blast shots are all too familiar for her and as the old man speaks a sickening feeling of dread creeps into a stomach that isn't hers and then she's running and running and jumping into a speeder and shooting off into the horizon-)_

_(There is the coarse feeling of sand and shifting fabric under her knees as she cries, eyes riveted to the scorched skeletons of two beloved figures, stinging from the tears and the billowing smoke emerging from the homestead.)_

_(There is no choice, she has to leave now, Ben will protect her, Ben will teach her to become a Jedi like her father was-)_

_(There is a dark cantina and a death threat and a Wookiee and a man whose ship is a piece of junk but it can make point five past light speed and it's got it where it counts, kid.)_

There is a stormtrooper escorting her to the control room to the Death Star, and there is a repulsive Grand Moff there to greet her.

There is a fire inside her, then an anguish, then an emptiness because Alderaan is gone gone gone _where has Alderaan gone_ -

 _(There is the sight of a space station hangar growing irrevocably closer and a phrase slips her mouth:_ I have a very bad feeling about this _.)_

There is a boy claiming to be called Luke Skywalker with a face that looks a lot like one she should recognise but she latches onto the word _Kenobi_ and then she is free.

**.**

Ice and snow on Hoth remind her of the mountain tops of Alderaan and maybe she fights with Han Solo just to try to forget about that.

Luke is missing and her heartbeat slows when she realises it, like it's trying to mimic his in a snowstorm. Like he has something to do with the thumping she something hears late at night, from when she was small and innocent and nothing had yet gone wrong.

Vader wants Luke and has taken Han, and she hates him she hates him she _hates him_ why can't he leave her loved ones _alone_ -

Luke is hanging under Cloud City and she doesn't know how he got there but she's not going to let the Sith Lord take another person from her. She has lost too many already.

Han is right in front of her, leaning against her shoulder, temporarily blind but free from the carbonite, and she feels nothing but elation. It quickly disappears.

Luke and Han are about to be thrown to the sarlacc and she thinks that maybe she hates Jabba the Hutt even more than she hates Vader.

When they get safe, she watches Luke fly off all over again.

**.**

_Leave this place._

Luke is her brother and Vader is her father and they're going to meet in a few minutes, on this very moon, and one of them might die when they do. She lost her biological family once; Vader can disappear now, for all he is to her, but she will not lose Luke again.

(The feeling of two supernovas against her newly-forming mind, one that murmured _brother_ and one that murmured _father_ ; two feelings that she's shielded against for so long that she barely remembers feeling them at all.)

Bail and Breha Organa were and still are her parents, and they are dead, and she will always miss them but they did not die in vain.

(A mother's face - Padmé Amidala's face - looking at her. This is no one's memory, not even hers; rather, an impression she never got to receive. The smile her mother gives her is sad, and she is beautiful. _She was very beautiful. . . But very sad._ )

Chewie and Lando and Wedge and all of the Rebellion are her friends. Her cousins. She knows them as well as she once knew her aunts back on Alderaan.

(A cooing call of _Leia_ from inside the house and the feeling of dirt under her palms as she digs in the flower patch. A scream of horror when her aunts see what it's done to her pristine white dress.)

Two families lost and another family gained, she thinks as she looks around the Ewok village. And they all deserve a happy ending.

**.**

The destruction of the Death Star can be seen in the skies of the forest moon of Endor. A smattering of cheering breaks out, but she has thoughts for one person, and Han seems to read her mind.

"I'm sure Luke wasn't one that thing when it blew," he said cautiously.

She smiles. She is not naïve enough to think this is the end, but it feels like it. It feels like it might finally be.

And she takes immense joy from being able to say with abject certainty: "He wasn't."


End file.
